A Town Under Indictment / A Wyoming professor examines Laramie in the wake of Matthew Shepard's murder

REVIEWED BY Kim Wyatt

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, October 15, 2000

LOSING MATT SHEPARD

Life and Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder By
Beth Loffreda Columbia University
; 189 pages; $22.95
Wind-swept plains, bison and barbed wire fences. It's hard to resist cliched imagery when talking about Wyoming. But these interpretations not only keep us from the truth, but they can also cause lasting damage, says
Beth Loffreda
in "Losing Matt Shepard."

The story of Shepard is familiar. On Oct. 8, 1998, the 21-year-old gay college student was bludgeoned and left to die along a fence in Laramie, Wyo. What isn't so familiar is what happened in Laramie after the murder, when the town became center stage for gay-rights activists advancing their cause and journalists out for a quick story.

Loffreda, assistant professor of English at the University of Wyoming and faculty adviser to the campus' Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Association, uses her insider's knowledge to trace the aftermath of the crime as it echoed through the courtroom, the legislature and day-to-day life in Laramie. Loffreda tackles class, race and homophobia as she studies the events that followed Shepard's death, including protests and memorials that united people with views antagonistic to the media invasion and the canonization of Shepard as a gay-rights martyr.

The book's focus is not Shepard or the men who murdered him but Laramie, a town of 26,000 not far from the Colorado border. Remarkably, what comes through in this book is not how different Laramie is from other towns but how similar. Geography aside, Laramie is just like any other small town in North America -- mostly decent people with a handful of bigots, racists and homophobes.

But news reports would lead the public to believe Laramie was some sort of cowboy town, an anomaly or a slice of the macho old West that couldn't abide gay people. Loffreda subtly argues that this sort of misinformation misses the real point: that it is a gamble being openly gay or lesbian anywhere in the United States.

This crime happened, she points out, in a country where gays cannot serve openly in the military, are not offered federal anti-discrimination protection, are denounced in churches and are invisible in schools. In other words, this crime could, and does, happen anywhere.

Loffreda wisely lets the people of Laramie tell the story, and fear is a consistent theme. A Laramie cop says it best: "There were quite a few things that affected me emotionally -- the viciousness of the crime, how small he was, things to that effect. (But) I think the thing that affected me the most was actually seeing the fear in the gay community. How can I have these people in my community so scared? My job is to protect people."

The book also zeroes in on how the story played out in the rest of the country. The media juggernaut triggered by Shepard's death was a force of its own. Celebrities, reporters and activists descended on Wyoming, many of them using the Shepard story to further a cause or a career.

Journalists fared particularly poorly. From the start, the coverage was sensational and often inaccurate, says Loffreda, a "story stitched out of repetition rather than investigation." For example, Shepard was not tied crucifixion-style to a desolate fence on a lonesome stretch of road, as was often reported. The fence along which Shepard was found was near an upscale housing development and a major interstate.

"The horror of Matt's death to me always seemed not that he lay in stark isolation but that he lay alone so close to so many and so much," Loffreda writes.

Loffreda asks tough questions that weren't addressed in most coverage of the crime: Was Shepard murdered because he was gay? Why was his murder followed so closely, versus any of a handful of vicious murders that occurred in Laramie and 33 anti-gay murders that happened nationwide that year? Why hasn't Wyoming passed hate-crimes legislation despite numerous bills? What happens when emotion, not action, is the only game in town?

She gives provocative answers, only occasionally lapsing into academese, using words such as "transsubstantiation" and "incommensurabilities" that only draw attention to themselves and disturb the otherwise compelling narrative.

When Loffreda considers the emotional extravagance of the crime's aftermath, few remain unscathed. National gay and lesbian groups had sound bites ready, but few spoke to the gay and lesbian residents of Laramie, and fewer still left any lasting legacy in the form of cold cash, sorely needed. After thousands of letters of support, a concert by Elton John and MTV anti-hate ads, what was left behind in Laramie? Two years later, there is no gay and lesbian office on campus, no gay bar or bookstore: "Somehow, despite the intensity of attention the murder drew, gay men and lesbians who live in Wyoming still felt marooned."

So is Laramie a cowboy town catching up with the times or just reflecting them? If Wyoming is a "don't ask, don't tell" kind of place, is it only because we are a "don't ask, don't tell" kind of country? Loffreda leaves the reader to consider why Shepard wasn't more important to the gay and lesbian struggle for equal rights when he was alive, struggling to be out in Laramie, than he was by virtue of his murder:

"It seems to me too that what that night asks of us, far more urgently, is a fresh understanding of gay life rather than simply gay death."